* tiny but powerful *

I am DONE with my month in Pleasanton! :-D I am SO glad May is over...for more reasons than one. I hereby forbid anyone else from giving me short-notice changes, at least for the next month. Can you all handle that? :-P

I found out tonight that a suspect has actually been named in the Jenny Lin case. WOW. I cannot express to you how crazy that seems to me. It has been 12 YEARS, and the Jenny Lin Foundation has been a huge part of my experience as a musician in Castro Valley. I can't even imagine what Mr. and Mrs. Lin must be feeling right now. I saw them on the 10 o'clock news - Channel 2 spent about 5 minutes on the case right at the beginning. I know it's just a suspect and they haven't even charged him yet, but having ANYTHING on the case just seems so unbelievable. It's been so long...

(For those of you wondering, no, I was not a close friend of Jenny's, but she lived two streets over from where my family lived at the time, so it was very close to home...literally. Their house was the same model as ours, so I used to be too terrified to go into my parents' bathroom at night. I knew Jenny as an acquaintance in middle school, because she was the pianist for the 7th/8th grade orchestra and I was the pianist for the 6th grade orchestra (this was before my time as a violinist, believe it or not). The creepy thing is that one of my brother's friends lived next door to the Lins and he was over at our house that night. Who knows what might have happened if he'd been home with his family to notice their dog barking...)

My thoughts and prayers are with you, Mr. and Mrs. Lin.

I figured out a way to make myself smile during the Big Apple: envisioning an apple getting chopped up into little pieces and then chomped up. It's at least amusing enough to get my face muscles to pull the corners of my mouth upwards. That, and Mohan gets a kick out of it, so when he's cracking up on the other side of the circle that helps too. Die, Apple, die! Hahahaha.

Spring Show was awesome, and I love the new CD. :-D Maybe more details later, but right now, I'm just barely surviving the weekend...

We love you, Mom! :)

Hope you're enjoying Vancouver with your friends! I love you!

From CNN.com - "5 Tips: Battling a sick office": "A recent study commissioned by Clorox Company found that teachers had the germiest jobs. In fact teachers had 10 times the germ rates than any other profession, according to Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona who did the study. That's because they're around kids most of the time - notorious germ spreaders."

And from the news clip:

GERMY JOBS
(Germs per square inch)

... Allergies, Back Pain, and Commute, my three new friends courtesy of working in Pleasanton. :-P

My week got off to a bad start on Monday. There was a stalled car on Charleston so it took me 15 minutes just to get to 101, which, in addition to the traffic on 101, 237, and 880, put me 15 minutes late in arriving to Pleasanton. I got there to find out that one of the Lower El teachers was sick with a bacterial infection, so I was to cover for her the rest of the morning and also do lunch coverage before taking my own lunch break. Most of this was fine except that, on Mondays, Lower El takes a "walk" right before lunch. Apparently, this "walk" lasts close to an hour and covers about 2 miles. I wasn't prepared with a hat or any sunscreen (though luckily I was wearing the correct shoes), but that would probably have been bearable were it not for the fact that, after the initial few blocks down a main street, the route turned onto one of those trails that run behind houses/along a creek...completely lined with all sorts of tall weeds. By the time we got back to school, I felt like my face was going on strike against itself. I think I blew my nose with five tissues in a row. So lunch duty after that was exciting. The play yard is just a wide open space so it was extremely windy, which didn't help my itchy eyes, but at least I was in the shade and no longer surrounded by tall weeds.

I had hoped that today would be better without traipsing through the allergens, and it was a little better, but everyone once in awhile I got a runny nose attack or an unbearable urge to rub my eyes. I haven't decided yet whether the prescription Allegra I had from the eczema is effective on everyday allergies. I may need to explore some other options. I also picked up some of the allergy eye drops that my dad used to give me, so hopefully that'll help.

The "B" and "C" companions are fairly self-explanatory. The commute has been taking over an hour each way (a little longer on the way back), and I just do not deal well with long drives. The back pain that I had so happily gotten rid of after graduating is now back. (Not that I drove a lot during college, but classes and computer time accounted for long periods of sitting.) I'm not 100% sure why my back hadn't been hurting much over the last 10 months, but I think it can be attributed to a combination of (a) not driving to work and (b) being more active during work hours. I really, really, really hope it goes away again after I stop working in Pleasanton.

Now that I've gotten all that complaining out of my system, I want to list the things I'm thankful for about Hacienda School:
- Tiffany doing her best to arrange a nice schedule for me
- all the teachers helping me transition and trying to make things easy for me
- the kids being so friendly and helpful
- not having too hard of a time learning their names...I've almost got all of them!
- the refreshing feeling of being in real classrooms in a real school building
- cleanliness and tidiness
- a comfortable teacher workroom
- being able to park close to the school building
- even though the drive is long, thank God it's counter-commute during rush hour
- Upper El has a cute white bunny named Marshmallow! so cute! (he comes over to lick your finger) :)

Check your voicemail. :)

I'll be working in Pleasanton for the remainder of this month. The umbrella organization that runs my school also runs another K-8 school out in Pleasanton (called Hacienda School), in addition to three preschool centers (located in Palo Alto, Pleasanton, and San Jose). Hacienda recently had one of their teachers quit, so I have to go over there to fill in while they interview to hire a new teacher. It's going to make May even more tiring and busy for me, but hey, who doesn't like some adventure? Oh wait, that would be me. :-P

I made it through my fifth Big Dance in a row! This time it was definitely much harder to stay up until 6am. (For those of you unacquainted with Big Dance, it's an all-nighter social dance event that lasts from 9pm-6am. Yes, we are all annually insane.) This year, no longer being a student, I had anticipated that I might not make it to the end. I'm always so tired on Fridays, and as the years go by I become less and less able to stay up late for any reason (even schoolwork, as I noticed during my fifth year of college). As it turned out, I ended up taking Friday off from work. That certainly upped my chances of staying awake at Big Dance, but since it came after a long week of work drama, the positive and negative factors kind of evened themselves out.

Overall, I had a pretty good time at Big Dance this year. It was the first year in a long time that I had very few responsibilities during the night (and actually, I still have never paid for a Big Dance ticket), so it was nice not to have to worry about anything super important. Danse Libre's performance was early in the evening, and I think it went pretty well. Energy was high (though the music was blasting way too loud during the Rio Tango), and the audience seemed to enjoy all three pieces. I appreciated having friends in the audience right out in front of me beaming the whole time -- thanks guys! It helped make the performance fun. :) Between our performing, watching all the other groups' performances, and "judging" the accelerating waltz contest, the first few hours of Big Dance passed by pretty quickly. Right around 12:30, though, I hit my first phase of extreme sleepiness. You know, when your body first realizes, "Hey, I should be asleep!" I battled through that period by killing time until Swingtime and Decadance's performances and getting some blood flowing with the first few of Richard's DJ-ed songs.

I seemed to catch a second wind for a little while, but it was short-lived. Finding the 2-4am Latin jazz band rather uninteresting, I felt the drowsiness setting in again with greater force. At this point, the prospect of making it to 6am looked pretty grim. Luckily, Kari saved the day (err, night?) by offering to make a Jack-in-the-Box run. I snagged a quick 30-minute nap on a couch while she and Bryan went to get food (yes, I fully admit that I cheated). That was really the turning point for me -- without the extra sustenance, I doubt I would have been motivated to leave the couch, much less wake up enough for more dancing. :-P Amazing what a couple tacos and a few sips of soda can do! It was 3:30 by then, and there was plenty to keep me active and/or distracted after that: the video montage of dance scenes from movies, Eric's birthday dance, the lullaby gauntlet (and subsequent wake-up dances), the Dawn Mazurka, and the various end-of-Big-Dance traditions. (If you're wondering what the Dawn Mazurka is, here's a tidbit from Richard's email last week: "There was a 19th century tradition at all-night balls to dance the most difficult and exhilarating dance - the Mazurka - at the first silvery light of dawn, to show that you weren't tired. This Bialy Mazur tradition, or 'White Mazurka,' has completely disappeared, except at Stanford's Big Dance, where every dawn for 12 [now 13!] years has seen the 1856 'Russian Mazurka Quadrille' danced around 5am.")

I had been doubtful about doing the Dawn Mazurka this year, because I didn't want to risk it with people I didn't know well. I was sure the room would be chaotic with possibly 100+ newbies (who just learned it last week in a two-hour class) crammed onto so little floor space. Fortunately, Kari and I talked about forming a set halfway through the night, so she was able to get Richard and Tracey and Julie (with a random partner) to join us. We had only a few minor mishaps, and otherwise made it through the entire choreography just fine. Go set!!

So that was Big Dance for me. Most of the night I was preoccupied with just staying awake, but it was definitely fun to see people who I don't see very often and catch all the mini-events of the night. I didn't have very much people energy, though (due to the aforementioned work drama), so I wasn't very proactive in striking up conversations or dancing with people other than Brian. I enjoyed all the dances I did have, so thank you if you shared one with me. :)

A total of 212 crazy people made it to 6am! Here's the all-nighter picture (sadly missing Brian, who had to use a stepladder due to the lack of balcony and therefore couldn't use a tripod):


In the aftermath, my body clock has been all messed up today. I woke up around 1:00 to take Melisa to the airport, and after that I did some grocery shopping at Ranch 99 and the Chinese bakery next door. I had intended to visit my mom at her flea market booth at De Anza College, but just as I was on my way there, she called and said everyone was packing up early. So I didn't end up going, but that's okay. Later in the afternoon, Brian took me to Costco to get some last things for Jenn's bridal shower tomorrow, and I promptly fell asleep for a few hours after getting back to my apartment. Now that I've eaten a super late dinner, I'm awake and groggy but not *sleepy*, so I'm not sure when I'll actually get to sleep tonight. :-P But such is life after Big Dance. Hope you're all having a good weekend!